Fatima Osei spent eleven years pushing for answers about her chronic pain before anyone used the word fibromyalgia in her presence. In that time she saw eight different doctors, was told twice that her symptoms were likely stress-related, and once left a hospital appointment crying in the car park because she had not understood what had just been said to her. "I thought that was just how it worked," she says now, sitting in the bright community space where she first walked through our door. "I thought the doctor was always right, and if I didn't understand something, that was my problem to solve on my own."
Fatima's experience is not unusual. Studies consistently show that women — particularly Black and South Asian women — wait longer for diagnoses of chronic pain conditions, are more likely to have their symptoms attributed to psychological causes, and are less likely to be offered the same investigative pathways as male patients presenting with equivalent complaints. Knowing this statistically is one thing. Living through it, appointment by appointment, year by year, is another thing entirely.
A flyer in her local library brought Fatima to one of Vibrant Health Advocates' monthly drop-in sessions in Aberdeen in the spring of 2024. She came, she admits, mostly out of loneliness. "I had been unwell for so long that my social world had got very small. I didn't really come for health information. I came because I wanted to be somewhere with people." What she found was a room full of women who knew exactly what she was talking about — not because they shared her diagnosis, but because they all had some version of the same story: years of appointments, years of feeling like a problem to be managed rather than a person to be heard.
Over the following months, Fatima learned what she calls the vocabulary of self-advocacy. How to write a brief, clear summary of her symptoms to hand to a new GP before the clock started. How to say "I would like this noted in my records" when a concern was waved away. How to ask for a second opinion without feeling she was being unreasonable or difficult. These feel like small skills. Their effect was not small at all. "I went from dreading every appointment to actually feeling like I had something to contribute to them," she says. "Like I was part of the conversation, not just the subject of it."
She also found unexpected joy in giving back. After attending the drop-in for six months, Fatima began volunteering as a session host — setting up chairs, making tea, and welcoming new faces, particularly women who arrived looking uncertain about why they had come. "When I see someone walk in and they're nervous and they don't quite know what they're doing there, I know exactly how to talk to them," she says. "I've been that person. I know what that face feels like from the inside."
Fatima's diagnosis — confirmed finally by a rheumatologist in late 2024, following a referral supported by her new GP — gave her answers but not resolution. Fibromyalgia is a condition you manage rather than cure. But she is managing it now with a confidence and a support network she simply did not have before. She knows which questions to ask at her quarterly appointments. She knows which adaptations she is entitled to request. She knows she does not have to leave a room feeling confused and too embarrassed to say so.
"The biggest thing Vibrant Health Advocates gave me wasn't information," she says. "It was the feeling that I was worth listening to. That sounds simple. But when you've spent years being made to feel otherwise, it changes everything." Our Aberdeen drop-in runs on the first and third Thursday of every month at the Seaton Community Centre. All women are welcome. No referral is needed.